unionization

The Pitfalls of Unionizing the TSA

by Hans Bader on February 12, 2011 · 3 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Mobility, Regulation

Robert Verbruggen wrote recently about the downside of unionizing the TSA in the National Review, taking issue with the Obama Administration’s decision to allow the agency to unionize even though past TSA heads regarded unionization as a threat to national security.  As he notes, “after a mere nine years in existence, the Transportation Security Administration rivals the DMV and the Postal Service as a played-out comedy cliché. And now the TSA is adding union bureaucracy to the mix.”   As he notes, unionization has made matters worse at other federal agencies:

“Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) — which, unlike the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service, is a federal law-enforcement agency that allows collective bargaining — illustrates the problem with letting unions interfere in disciplinary matters: The agency got into an arbitration war over how it could discipline an employee who literally fell asleep on the job.  Worse, CBP lost. And the websites of NTEU and AFGE are already competing to see which one can provide the longer list of TSA disciplinary actions it has overturned. (Before the determination instituted collective bargaining, TSA agents were nonetheless allowed to join unions if they wanted, and about 13,000 did.)”

We earlier wrote about additional downsides to allowing unionization at this link.  One writer’s mistreatment at the hands of the TSA is chronicled at this link.

The TSA is already not terribly effective.  (Undercover agents have managed to slip bombs past TSA screeners, and the TSA is even less effective at detecting them than the private security firms it replaced after 9/11).  The AFGE union predicted on January 21 that voting to unionize the TSA will begin by mid-March.

Another TSA Nightmare

by Hans Bader on February 7, 2011 · 2 comments

in Labor, Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

The writer Andrew Ian Dodge shares his painful experience at the hands of the TSA at this link. The TSA inflicted prolonged pain on him through completely unnecessary “kneeding and prodding” of his scar from a “colon cancer operation that went from” his crotch to his sternum. He still hurt a day later.

Dodge wrote about the TSA’s recent decision to block competing private companies from performing airline security screening, even though private airport screeners do better on customer-satisfaction and passenger-happiness measures than TSA employees. I wrote earlier about how the TSA’s attack on private screening will harm innovation and passenger safety. CEI’s Brian McGraw wrote about the TSA’s recent decision to allow unionization of TSA employees, which TSA heads during the Bush administration had consistently opposed on security grounds.

TSA Shuts Door on Private Airport Screening Program That Exposed TSA’s Inefficiency

by Hans Bader on January 30, 2011 · 7 comments

in Labor, Mobility, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

The Transportation Security Administration has shut the door on a private airport screening program that was making the inefficient agency look bad by outperforming it in safety, innovation, and customer satisfaction. The TSA’s action was praised by a liberal union that expects to unionize the TSA, the American Federation of Government Employees. Its head, John Gage, applauded the Obama administration for requiring a “federalized” government “work force.”

The exemption allowing outsourcing to private screeners was originally created in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, when Congress and the Bush administration foolishly nationalized American airport security and created the TSA. While the screeners would be provided by private contractors, they would still be paid for by the TSA and be required to follow the same procedures as TSA-employed screeners.

Previously, the Screening Partnership Program allowed airports to replace government screeners with private contractors. 16 airports did so. “But on Friday, the TSA denied an application by Springfield-Branson Airport in Missouri to privatize its checkpoint workforce, and in a statement,” TSA head John “Pistole indicated other applications likewise will be denied.” The TSA’s head said he did not see any “clear or substantial advantage” to the TSA in allowing additional airports to use private screeners, although he said that the few other airports that already use private screeners will be allowed to continue to do so.

Florida Congressman John Mica (R), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, criticized the TSA’s decision. “It’s unimaginable that TSA would suspend the most successfully performing passenger screening program we’ve had over the last decade,”Mica said Friday night. “Nearly every positive security innovation since the beginning of TSA has come from the contractor screening program,” Mica said.  Supporters of private screening say it is easier to discipline and replace under-performing private screeners than government ones.

Earlier, the TSA retaliated against a veteran pilot who exposed the TSA’s security failures, taking away whistleblower Chris Liu’s credentials and firearm.

The Obama administration is now seeking to unionize the TSA, even though the TSA was originally forbidden to unionize due to security concerns. Unlike the TSA’s current head, all past TSA administrators have recognized that collective bargaining and union work rules are inconsistent with the flexibility needed to protect public safety and adapt quickly to changes in terrorist tactics. (Undercover agents have managed to slip bombs past TSA screeners, and the TSA is even less effective at detecting them than the private security firms it replaced after 9/11). The AFGE union predicted on January 21 that voting to unionize the TSA will begin by mid-March.

The Obama administration is also undermining the security of railroad passengers by gutting an expert, highly-rated, anti-terror agency at Amtrak, which Amtrak’s unions hate, despite its efficiency, because it is not unionized.

An Intrusive, Ineffective, Unionized TSA?

by Hans Bader on November 29, 2010

in Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Privacy

Much has been written about the backlash against the TSA’s intrusive new screening methods. Law professor Jeff Rosen has argued that they violate the Fourth Amendment, since they are more invasive than alternative screening methods, but may be no more effective. Others have argued that the screening will kill more people than it saves from terrorist attacks, even if it ever prevents a terrorist attack, since it will result in angry travelers traveling by car rather than by airplane, resulting in hundreds of additional deaths annually, since fatalities are much higher on the road than in the air. (One scientist argues that the screenings will also lead to an increase in radiation-related deaths.)

Such screening methods are only as effective as the employees who use them, and lazy or inattentive employees can render any screening method useless.  The Obama administration is now poised to unionize the TSA, which would make it harder to remove lazy or inattentive employees, and harder to reassign employees as needed in responding to any attempted terror attacks.  The Washington Examiner, and John Fund of The Wall Street Journal, earlier criticized the administration’s support for unionization, which past TSA heads recognized would undermine public safety.

As John Fund notes, “if you think TSA is dysfunctional and unpopular now, wait until it unionizes. This month, the Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that 50,000 TSA personnel will be allowed to vote on whether or not to join a union with full collective bargaining rights. The American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union are already gearing up their campaigns to win over the screeners.”

As the Examiner notes:

[A]dapting to evolving security threats requires a level of workplace flexibility that is incompatible with rigid union workplaces. After a plot to blow up a dozen U.S.-bound airliners from Britain over the Atlantic was broken up in 2006, the TSA changed its procedures in 12 hours to deal with new concerns about liquid explosives. Unions make it notoriously difficult for managers to change job descriptions and procedures, so it’s hard to believe a unionized TSA would have sufficient flexibility to cope with constantly changing terrorist challenges.

In 2007, Congress, in legislation backed by then-Senator Obama, passed legislation enabling the TSA to unionize — a stance endorsed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who earlier claimed that “the system worked” when a terrorist nearly blew up a plan, only to be foiled by alert passengers, with no help from the TSA. (The terrorist was allowed on the plane despite being on a terror watch list, and then set fire to explosives.  To put out the fire, passengers had to violate TSA red tape like rules banning passengers from getting out of their seat during the last hour of a flight.) The Examiner says that “the TSA has yet to catch one terrorist.”

The TSA often fails to detect explosive ingredients and fake bombs in performance tests. A study found that the TSA is more than twice as likely to fail to detect a bomb as the private security firms it replaced. And TSA’s failure rate is three or four times as high as the few remaining private firms still allowed to handle airline security. In tests, TSA failed to detect fake bombs 60 percent of the time at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and 75 percent of the time in Los Angeles.  The Obama administration is also undermining railroad safety through pro-union favoritism.

Card Check Loses Support, but Threat Isn’t Over

by Ivan Osorio on January 5, 2009 · 1 comment

in Economy, Labor, Regulation

Today in The Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel dissects the shifting political prospects for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), commonly known as the “card check” bill. (“Card check” is a unionization procedure whereby union organizers circumvent the secret ballot process by getting workers to sign union cards in the open, exposing them  to aggressive, hard-sell intimidation tactics.)

It hasn’t been much noticed, but the political ground is already shifting under Big Labor’s card-check initiative. The unions poured unprecedented money and manpower into getting Democrats elected; their payoff was supposed to be a bill that would allow them to intimidate more workers into joining unions. The conventional wisdom was that Barack Obama and an unfettered Democratic majority would write that check, lickety-split.

Instead, union leaders now say they are being told card check won’t happen soon. It seems the Obama team plans to devote its opening months to important issues, like the economy, and has no intention of jumping straight into the mother of all labor brawls. It also seems Majority Leader Harry Reid, even with his new numbers, might not have what it takes to overcome a filibuster. It’s a case study in how quickly a political landscape can change, and how frequently the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Paradoxically, it’s Mr. Reid’s bigger majority that is now hurting him. In 2007, he got every Democrat (save South Dakota’s Tim Johnson, who was out sick) to vote for cloture. But it was an easy vote. Democrats like Mr. Pryor knew the GOP held the filibuster, and that Mr. Bush stood ready with a veto. Now that Mr. Reid has 58 seats, red-state Democrats in particular are worried they might actually have to pass this turkey, infuriating voters and businesses back home.

Indeed, it’s much harder to stand behind a vote when it may lead to tangible consequences, so it’s not that surprising that the prospect of card check actually passing should scare some of its former alleged supporters away — especially with an election being over. But the business community and Senate Republicans need to look beyond card check at EFCA’s other provisions, which would impose other kinds of burdensome labor regulation: binding arbitration and increased “unfair labor practice” penalties on employers.

Binding arbitration would oblige the federal government to appoint an arbitrator, who would impose a contract in a labor dispute, if a union and an employer did not reach an agreement after 120 days. This would allow one side to wait out the 120-day period before having a contract imposed — and since an imposed contract would bring the union closer to its demands relative to conditions under the expired contract, the union would be more likely to use this provision to its advantage. So much for freedom of contract.

In addition, increased penalties for employers over alleged “unfair labor practices” would give unions yet another club to threaten employers with during organizing drives.

As Strassel notes, “Credit for this new environment [of loss of support for card check] goes to a business community that has been uncharacteristically unified in a sweeping campaign against the bill.” However, even as card check begins to lose support, the business community needs to focus on EFCA’s other provisions, which are also extremely harmful — and should be no less radioactive.